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Rashomon

The Phoenix is renowned for showing original features and Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’, released in 1950, is no exception. This third film from the acclaimed Japanese director won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. Kurosawa followed this success with twenty-seven further films that include the majestic ‘Seven Samurai’, released in 1954.

‘Rashomon’ combines two Japanese folk stories into a tale that explores, from a focal point of the ruined Rashomon temple near Kyoto, the nature of trust, of truth, and the unimpressive reality of human nature. Following a murder in a wood, four characters recount their versions of the fighting that led to the death and flashback is used to illustrate each version. The first three versions from characters implicit in the murder speak of honour and heroics, whilst the final tale from the innocuous Woodcutter, apparently an eyewitness account of the murder, is one of cowardice quite different from the bold and gripping stories told by the other three characters. This contrast is heightened by the soundtrack, a central part of Kurosawa’s technique, that uses low, brass notes and bold drumming during the first three fight scenes. The final (real?!) fight scene, however, is starkly stripped of any epic-sounding music, accompanied instead by the bare jostling of leaves, frantic breathing, whimpers and pleading to enhance the raw, distinctly un-heroic nature of reality.

Whose tale are we to believe? Often in films the flashback occurs at the beginning or the end, to either show the truth from the outset or to validate the finding of the truth at the conclusion. Here however, the audience faces a conundrum; we can no longer trust the flashback since we are presented with five takes on the sequence of events, all we can rely on is our sound judgement of human nature. Our role of Judge, along with the unnamed, generic characters, their poised, methodized acting style, and the simplistic three settings recall a Brechtian-style stage play.

Furthermore, the film is almost Shakespearean in its triangular, farcical nature, recalling at once the four lovers driven mad with love in the woods in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and the wildness of the island and its native Caliban in ‘The Tempest’. However Kurosawa’s distinctive cinematography, precise close-ups, bold editing, soundtrack, multiple perspectives and long periods of silence, all of which are pivotal to his aesthetic, combine to make this film uniquely filmatic and captivating.